Ubiquiti Announces RouterStation Challenge Winners

Riskable writes "Remember that $200,000 Contest For a Better Open-WRT Wireless Router GUI? Today Ubiquiti posted the winning entries to their support wiki. The grand prize was a tie between PyCI (written by yours truly) and NETSHe with OpenNET as the runner up. Source code and firmware images for each entry are available for download on their respective wiki pages. I'll be setting up a project page for PyCI (and l2sh) soon to make it a participatory open source product. Even if you don't have a RouterStation, or don't care about OpenWRT, there are numerous Python modules and tools inside of PyCI that could prove useful to other open source projects (e.g. iptables.py can read/interpret over 400 permutations of the iptables command). I'll also be checking the comments if anyone has any questions for me about PyCI or the contest in general. BTW: I'd like to thank all the commenters in the original article that insinuated that the technical requirements were impossible and/or that making a GUI to configure such complex things is a waste of time. I read every one and I wouldn't have made it such an obsession otherwise!"

Encouragement

[R2.0]

"I'd like to thank all the commenters in the original article that insinuated that the technical requirements were impossible and/or that making a GUI to configure such complex things is a waste of time. I read every one and I wouldn't have made it such an obsession otherwise!""

Ummm - you're welcome?

What no HL mod?

[spydabyte]

Seriously, when will we realize that the best User Interface is a 3D environment individuals can navigate as easily as the world around us. Just make a quake, darkforces, or HL mod, pull in dynamic data that any web interface can provide, and have the guns change variables in a fun interactive way. Fine fine, use more recent games or engines, but you get my point?

Screenshots?

[__aailob1448]

Yo I'm really glad for you and imma let you finish, but your links have the least screenshots of all time, of all time!

Re:What no HL mod?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news; but trying to go through life, stuck in a computer UI, is no picnic [youtube.com].

PyCI has a Quake-style console

[Riskable]

You know, my winning entry has a Quake-style drop-down console window. Hit the ESC key on any page in PyCI and it will bring down the terminal just like in Quake and Half-Life (in this case, running the ash shell). I would've used the tilda key but that might actually be used in an input element somewhere.

I know your post was in jest but PyCI actually does include some elements from a first-person shooter!

Re:What no HL mod?

[zapakh]

Seriously, when will we realize that the best User Interface is a 3D environment individuals can navigate as easily as the world around us. Just make a quake, darkforces, or HL mod, pull in dynamic data that any web interface can provide, and have the guns change variables in a fun interactive way. Fine fine, use more recent games or engines, but you get my point?

Agreed - Once you've used a tool like psdoom [unm.edu] to terminate a runaway browser process, there's no going back. It's only natural that the killing of processes should be represented as killing in the user interface! I'm just waiting for the VR helmet or at least some head tracking. Using a keyboard in the course of system administration is so... artificial.

Re:Hardware recommendations?

[gad_zuki!]

What? Linksys sells a special 54g for WRT. Im too lazy to get the full model number but it ends with L.

Help me Steve Jobs!

[eviltediz43]

WRT, PyCl, ALkJ what? All these words are too confusing. Isn't there something simpler, whiter, and more expensive that could fit in an envelope and do the same job? Like iOpen -WRT?